Eliana Willis

This package debuted in January as a beta, with a tempting discount for early subscribers. With today’s announcement, the beta label goes away, and so does the discount. For $70 a month, you get 25 channels, including MLB TV, the NFL and NBA and Golf channels, all the ESPN variants and ESPN+, TNT, TBS, and both Fox Sports channels, along with a handful of other sports networks. Also: Why I still recommend this Sony 4K TV over the cheaper Hisense and TCL modelsThe lineup also includes all of the big cable news networks (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNBC) and, depending on your market, local network affiliates from ABC/NBC/FOX/CW. It’s the most expensive of the new bundles, but it’s a relative bargain for diehard sports fans.For an additional $13 a month, you can add the five channels in the MySports Extra mini pack, which includes the NFL RedZone and Motor Trend channels. More

John W. Banagan/Getty Images Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have become increasingly entrenched in our daily lives. However, a new study suggests that the American workforce seems largely uninterested in adopting AI en masse.  According to a Pew Research study released this week, around 80% of Americans don’t […] More

OpenAI Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a roadmap for its upcoming models, GPT-4.5 and GPT-5. In the X post, Altman shared that GPT-4.5, codenamed Orion internally, would be its last non-chain-of-thought model. Other than that, the details of the model remained a mystery — until today.  GPT-4.5 has launched On Thursday morning, […] More

Jason Hiner/ZDNET & Maria Diaz/ZDNETApple held its annual iPhone event back in September 2024 and debuted the iPhone 16 series. Much of the presentation was dedicated to showing off all of the artificial intelligence (AI) features that would eventually come to the smartphone. While the AI tech was certainly impressive, does it make the iPhone 16 enough of an upgrade to warrant a new $1,000+ payment?Also: The best iPhones you can buy today (and if you should wait for iPhone 17)As an iPhone 14 Pro Max user, I’m not convinced that the new AI-enabled iPhone 16 Pro More

<!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways The NUU N30 is available now on Amazon for $129. This $129 phone would make an amazing first phone for a child or a backup device. The fingerprint scanner on the N30 is in the power button, so there’s no under-screen biometrics and the phone doesn’t support wireless charging. –> Let’s […] More

<!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways Lenovo’s 10th-Gen Yoga Slim 9i retails for $1,760. It’s a lightweight laptop with a striking design and an even more striking 4K OLED touchscreen. However, some will find its lack of ports limiting and the webcam low-quality. more buying choices One of the things I appreciate about Lenovo is its willingness […] More

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETThe Pixel Watch 3 is getting a first-of-its-kind, potentially life-saving feature. Also: My new favorite Android smartwatch outperforms Google and Samsung in a crucial wayIn a blog post, Google announced that it had received FDA clearance for its Loss of Pulse Detection feature. Tracking your heartbeatThe feature works by tracking your heartbeat. If your heart stops beating — due to cardiac arrest, respiratory or circulatory failure, overdose, or poisoning — your watch will automatically turn on more accurate infrared LEDs and look for motion data. If the watch determines you’re not responsive, it will start a countdown and audio alarm. If you still don’t respond, the watch will place a call to emergency services using your LTE or phone connection, inform them that you don’t have a pulse, and share your location. Also: The best Android smartwatchesGoogle says the watch will be able to tell the difference between an actual cardiac event and the user simply removing the watch. Safety features like fall detection and crash detection aren’t new, but they aren’t at the level of this one (which is why it needed FDA clearance first). Other watches have heartbeat tracking, but they track much less frequently than the Pixel 3. The Apple Watch, for example, tracks heart rate every 3 to 7 minutes by default. More

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETAlexa+, Amazon’s freshly unveiled generative AI update, promises to take the Alexa virtual assistant to the next level. You can expect Alexa+ to do things that your traditional Alexa can’t, such as generate richer answers to questions that previously would have received canned responses. Alexa+ will also be capable of engaging in more natural conversations, eliminating the need to use your “Alexa voice” and enunciate each syllable of your request to the voice assistant. Instead, it will understand you when you speak naturally. It will also maintain the context of a conversation throughout; for example, you can give it a file to peruse and ask multiple follow-up questions about it. Also: Not all Echo devices will get Alexa+ – see if yours made the listThese are all very useful ways to leverage the generative AI power of Alexa+. Still, one of the things I’m most looking forward to is giving Amazon’s virtual assistant multiple prompts at once. Instead of asking, “Alexa, who was the first black woman in space?” and getting a predetermined response from an Alexa Answers contributor and being done with the subject, the voice assistant will generate the response and let you ask follow-up questions, like “What does she do today?” or ” How many others have reached space since her?” More